Rabbi Yair Robinson

Parashat Shoftim: Back to School

8/29/25

If your social media feed looked like mine, or you looked out your window at just the right time, you knew this week was ‘back to school’ week. The rituals of taking pictures of the first day of school (and sharing them on the internet), watching them get on the bus or out of the back seat in carline, were all observed. I watched parents nervously drop off their excited kids at Einstein and the ECC this week in-person, and saw many of the same feelings of pride, hopefulness, and anticipation in each first day photo that went through my timeline for kids of all ages, preschool through college.

Sending our kids to school is a rite of passage for us as Jews, and not just in the modern period. The Torah reminds us repeatedly to teach our children. The Talmud tells us at what age a child should begin learning each text: Tanakh, Mishnah, Midrash, and so on. Medieval Jewish teachers would write letters in honey on a slate and have the new learner lick it off–after repeating the name of the letter and its sound–so that they would know the sweetness of Torah and learning. And Jewish tradition reminds us that someone who teaches even a single letter, it is as if that person had raised the child.

There has been a great deal of anxiety about learning of late. Or rather, anxieties. Even before the pandemic, we worried whether our children were learning the skills necessary to be ‘successful’, whatever that means, and post-pandemic, we have grown even more concerned about their learning environments, the effects of social media, screentime, and the ways ChatGPT and other so-called AIs are sapping our kids of critical thinking skills. And while the issue of antisemitism in schools has been magnified since Fall of 2023,, Jewish students and teachers in particular have found themselves all-too often caught in a morass of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist sentiment, with often very little response from the very administrations that are supposed to protect them.

We are not the first generation to wring our hands about learning and education–you can go ahead and ask Socrates about that–nor are we the first generation to face anti-Jewish sentiment in schools, or a sense that learning has been politicized. After all, it was only fifteen years before I attended my east coast public high school that the administration routinely had to break up fistfights about reciting the Lord’s Prayer in the morning…because the Protestants and Catholics disagreed with how it was being recited. But something feels different now, especially because of the eroding of that critical thinking that is so necessary for meaningful civic life.

Learning, as we Jews know, is not merely academic, nor just for the sake of learning a trade or a set of skills. It is so that we can function in the world as thoughtful, moral agents. We learn so that we can fulfill the mitzvot, and so that we can better respond to the needs of others. We learn in order to do. Which is why this text is so critical for us.

Here, the text explains how we are supposed to, if we so desire, select a king over Israel. A king ‘as do all the nations around me’. Except as we see, it is not like how the other nations had it at all. The king of Israel could not have too many horses–that is, too big an army–nor send people back to Egypt in servitude. And the king should either write the Torah himself or have it written for him and keep it nearby, in order to “not act haughtily toward his fellows or deviate from the Instruction to the right or to the left.” The king, after all, must remain not only one of us, but remain committed to God and God’s Torah. At the end of the day the king is a servant of the people and the Tradition, just as all of us are, and must learn Torah just as we do to make sure we can think about the world, ourselves and each other in a way that is in service to the needs we see and remove cruelty from our midst. At a time when our political discourse feels especially fraught and it seems like those with whom we disagree see an entirely different reality, a problem that starts in the earliest days of our children’s education, this commitment to Torah and learning-as-critical thinking should encourage us to return to our curiosity and creativity and remind ourselves of our sacred purpose.

It has always struck me that our new year–Rosh Hashanah–corresponds to the new year for learning, the beginning of the school year. For what is renewal and return if not a chance to learn and relearn what is most essential in this world: how we care for and uplift one another. As our families return to school, may we be open to that learning ourselves. Amen.